Chapter 1
All Giana Sorrentino had thought about for six years was getting her freedom. Now she finally had it, and to her horror, had learned that freedom was more terrifying than she could have imagined. It also seemed to change from day to day.
Today, freedom tasted like the sludgy, bitter grounds at the bottom of a cup of Turkish coffee and smelled like the salty air of Bodrum. Giana tipped her tiny cup back, swallowing the last of the cold dregs. The caffeine was a welcome jolt, a sharp smack of energy she needed in the sun-drugged lethargy of the afternoon. She set the cup down on the scarred wooden table of the beachside café, her gaze casually sweeping the promenade.
It was a habit ground into her bones, as reflexive as breathing. Scan and assess. Identify threats. Map escape routes. It was like a twisted game she had learned to play with herself.
Exit one: the crowded promenade, a maze of sunburned tourists, laughing locals, and kids screaming and eating ice cream. A chaotic escape, but a viable one.
Exit two: the narrow, bougainvillea-choked alleyway beside the café, leading back into the labyrinth of the old town. A bottleneck. A trap. Giana shook her head. That way was to be avoided.
See, Rodrigo? I was listening to your lectures.
The thought of his name was an unwelcome intruder, sharp and cold. She had pretended to ignore him when he had drilled safety lessons into her, but they had been drilled so often that they had become second nature, just like he hoped.
Fucking prick. He just had to be right about that, too.
Giana pushed Rodrigo’s ghost away, something that was harder than it should have been, and focused on the screen of her laptop. Lines of pristine code shimmered in the shade of the faded blue awning. A clean build. A new identity. A digital ghost in the machine, untraceable and unburdened. This was her work now. Her life. Building firewalls for clients who paid well for paranoia, and occasionally, tearing them down for kicks.
The feeling of satisfaction was almost as good as when she finished a painting, but that artistic, dreamer version of Giana had gone dormant within her.
She had passed art school with decent marks, but the passion had faded. She had been more focused on computers and getting free of the Colleoni family by the end of it. Now she was free, and she still couldn’t bring herself to pick up a paintbrush. The Muse refused to visit her, no matter how much she pleaded.
Giana stretched her arms and looked out over the ocean. This was what she’d craved for 2,190 days. The right to sit in a public place without a shadow stitched to her heel. The freedom to wear a simple T-shirt and linen pants instead of the curated armor of a Colleoni pet. The luxury of being no one. Just a girl with a laptop, a killer view of Bodrum Castle, and a past she was trying to outrun.
A warm breeze drifted in off the water, carrying the enticing smells of grilled fish and the sweet, cloying smoke from a nearby shisha lounge. The murmur of Turkish, English, German, and Russian blended with the gentle lapping of waves and the screaming of gulls. It should have been paradise. It was paradise.
So why did she keep turning around and expecting to see a familiar dark figure?
You can’t possibly miss that asshole. ‘Miss’ was probably too strong a word for it, but there was a sense of absence.
For six long years, Giana had been watched. Every moment. Every breath. Under Gabriella Colleoni’s orders, she had been kept in a gilded cage forged from a mother’s ruthless love for her sons, and a cold, calculated revenge for the death of her husband at the hands of Giana’s reckless father.
Gabriella had needed to keep Giana alive and controlled. Giana was the last Sorrentino and a loose end that she hadn’t killed because it gave her power.
The Colleoni Family maintained their powerful mercenary army with information, protection for hire, and occasionally, by finding things that were unique.
Giana had heard whispers during her time as a pet. Gabriella’s cryptic meetings with men who spoke of holy and heretical relics, grimoires, and other artifacts traded through their own version of the dark web. Magic.
Giana had never seen it herself, but she knew the Colleonis operated in a world where the impossible was just another business expense.
Gabriella had known that Giana would be useful to her one day, and she never got rid of anything of value. She had shackled Giana to her youngest son, Leo, in a betrothal that had been a lie from the moment the ring was slipped on her finger.
Leo was meant to be the charming, reckless, beautiful distraction for her, but it had backfired on Gabriella. Not only was Leo the assassin who had wiped out her family in a single night, but he was also gay.
He had told Giana both things when Gabriella had tried to make him play happy families. He made sure that Giana knew he would never touch her and that she would never be forced to touch him.
Gabriella Colleoni had cared about her youngest son’s feelings about as much as she had cared about Giana’s, which was not at all. The criminal underworld saw a power match that Gabriella needed for leverage against her competitors.
Leo had managed to get away for a while, even with two bullets from Gabriella, but she had kept up the lie that Leo and Giana were engaged when she learned that Leo had lived.
Giana was the only one who got stuck in a cage, and her true warden had never been Gabriella or Leo.
It had always been Rodrigo.
The eldest Colleoni brother. The silent one. The strategist. The marksman with eyes that saw everything and a stillness that screamed danger. He was the unseen presence that had haunted the edges of her life. Her shadow.
Il Mostro was what he was known as in the criminal underground. All the Colleoni men were killers. Leo was their hacker and assassin; Dario was their charmer who could make you laugh before he cut your throat, and Rodrigo was the strategist, the heir, and the one they only let off the chain when they wanted complete annihilation.
Giana had been able to feel Rodrigo’s gaze from rooftops a kilometer away, sensed his influence in the way doors opened for her, and watched threats melt away before they could form. He never spoke of it to her or asked her to thank him. He never had to.
Rodrigo had always been paranoid about her safety, even more so after whatever had happened with Leo and the Edgeworth family a few months ago. She had heard Leo talking about a horror-filled night in Istanbul during Gabriella’s wake. There had been monsters who had attacked them, and she hadn’t been sure if he meant the people or something else entirely.
Whatever happened that night, Rodrigo’s protection around her intensified right up until he had set her free.
Giana told herself every day that she hated Rodrigo. Hated his quiet arrogance, his unnerving perception, and the way he looked at her when he thought no one was watching. She had spent six years perfecting her hate, honing it into a shield.
Then Gabriella Colleoni had died, and the world tilted on its axis. Rodrigo had taken over the family the minute she stopped breathing. He had summoned Giana to the Colleoni estate on the day of Gabriella’s funeral. In front of his brothers, he told her the family would let her go if she returned the money she had stolen from them with her hacking skills. He hadn’t mentioned that he had been the one to give her access to the Colleoni servers to begin with, and Leo and Dario hadn’t asked. Even if Gabriella hadn’t died, Rodrigo would have ensured Giana’s freedom. His mother’s death had just sped that plan up.
Rodrigo wanted Giana to be free of them, but he never told her why. That was the only question she had left, and she had been too much of a coward to ask the last time she saw him.
Giana could still feel the press of his lips against the back of her hand, all those weeks ago.
“I’ve always said you’re not the kind of woman who belongs in a cage,” he had said, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through her.
And then she had run before he changed his mind.
First to Paris, then to Lisbon, and now here, to where Europe bled into Asia. She had put thousands of miles between herself and the Colleoni empire.
Freedom. Instead of ambrosia, it tasted like loneliness.
A phantom itch of someone watching her traced its way up Giana’s spine, knocking her out of her brooding.
Giana resisted the urge to look over her shoulder. That would have given away that she knew they were there. She casually leaned over to ask the table beside her for some of their sugar and scanned the top of the building. Nothing.
Maybe Gabriella Colleoni had driven her crazy after all.
Giana rubbed at her temples, an awkward laugh coming out of her. For the first time in six years, no one was watching. The silence was deafening. It was a gaping void where a constant, low-grade hum of dread had been.
She hated the dread then, but at least she’d known its source. This emptiness… it was shapeless, and somehow, more menacing.
Paranoia is a side effect of survival.
Rodrigo hadn’t said that, but he might as well have. It sounded like one of his pronouncements.
Giana forced herself to relax, dragging her focus back to her screen, fingers flying across the keyboard. She was building a program for a shipping magnate in Singapore to track down a thief. It was good money and proof that she was more than a relic of a dead mafia family and a failed artist.
She was Giana Sorrentino, for fuck’s sake. If she could survive Gabriella’s games, she could survive anything.
The sun dipped lower, painting the whitewashed houses on the hillside in shades of apricot and rose. The call to prayer, the ezan, echoed from a nearby minaret, a haunting, beautiful melody that momentarily silenced the tourist chatter.
Giana closed her eyes and prayed that her creative muse would return one day. Her stomach growled in answer, and she sighed.
Maybe she could find a place that served iskender kebab and somewhere to dance the night away, simply because she could. She stretched, arching her back, and let her gaze drift over the thinning crowd.
And that was when she saw the man.
He was sitting two tables over, partially obscured by a potted palm. He wasn’t a tourist. The expensive but understated linen shirt, the fit of his trousers, and the quiet intensity were all wrong. He wasn’t looking at the sea. He wasn’t talking on a phone or reading a book.
He was watching her.
His eyes, cold and flat, met hers for a fraction of a second before sliding away, a casual dismissal that was anything but. She had grown up with men with eyes like that. He stuck out like a sore thumb.
Sloppy, Rodrigo’s voice whispered, and for once she agreed with him.
An icy finger of instinct traced a line of warning up her spine. The air in her lungs seemed to thicken, to turn to glass.
One man is a coincidence.
Her training, the litany of rules her father and then Rodrigo had drilled into her over the years, surfaced from the depths of her memory.
Two men are a pattern.
Keeping her movements relaxed and lazy, Giana brushed her dark hair over her shoulder. She scanned past the couple sharing a plate of calamari and the tired-looking family packing up their beach bags.
There.
Another one. Standing near a simit cart at the end of the promenade. He had a different build, thicker and shorter, but he had the same predatory focus that was aimed in her direction. He was pretending to look at his phone, but his thumb wasn’t moving, and the screen was dark.
Giana’s heart didn’t race. It slowed, each beat a heavy drum against her ribs. Thump. Thump. Thump.
The world sharpened, and the colors grew more vibrant, the sounds more distinct. The smell of salt was suddenly overpowering. Hyperawareness kicked in, a brutal shot of adrenaline that cleared her head.
This wasn’t Rodrigo’s suffocating protection. This was the thing Rodrigo had been protecting her from.
The Sorrentino Family’s past wasn’t dead. It had just been dormant. Now, it had finally caught up to her.
Three men are a plan.
Where was the third? In the alley? Behind her? On a rooftop?
Don’t panic, Giana. Panic gets you killed. Assess and then act.
Her phone was on the table, next to her empty coffee cup. Her purse, with a can of military-grade pepper spray, was on the chair opposite her. Too far away.
The phone was closer. One touch would activate a silent alarm connected to a private security firm she had hired. It was a pale imitation of Colleoni resources, but it was better than nothing.
The man at the table hadn’t moved, but the one by the cart was slowly starting to drift in her direction. They were going to box her in.
Her plan formed in a second. Create a scene. Flip the table. Scream. Run for the crowded part of the promenade. Disappear into the chaos.
They wouldn’t risk a public spectacle. Not unless they were professionals of the highest order. And if they were, she was already dead.
Her hand moved slowly across the table toward her phone. Her muscles were coiled, springs wound tight, ready to explode into motion. Just another inch. Her fingertips brushed the cool glass screen.
Now.
She was about to shove the table, to fill her lungs with air and scream, when a shadow fell over her from behind. A hand clamped over her mouth and nose, silencing her before it could come out. An arm wrapped around her chest, pinning her arms to her sides, lifting her from the chair with terrifying ease as she struggled. A sharp, chemical scent filled her nostrils.
Lazy bastards, Rodrigo whispered in disgust.
Giana’s body thrashed, a useless, frantic fight. Her vision swam, the beautiful, sun-drenched café blurring at the edges.
The man at the other table rose calmly and dropped some money on the table. He gave her a dead-eyed look of utter indifference as her world dissolved into black pinpricks.
Her last coherent thought wasn’t of freedom or fear or the faces of the family that had been stolen from her.
It was a single, furious, desperate prayer. Rodrigo, help me!
And then…nothing.
***
Want to read more? This one is about to be out in FULL over on my Ream Stories (and its MASSIVE – You’re welcome). You can catch up here. As an FYI, this book and the next (Dario’s book) will be on Ream as exclusives until the end of the year. I will have it available on my Curios store too, but more on that soon!
Have a Happy Easter!
Alessa xx
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